Executive chef Don Boyd (right background) and garde manger Burt Hartford (left foreground) are among the crew handling a typical lunch rush. The cafe has been a boon for New Orleans's Central City, spurring new businesses to open on the same street.

I recall Pablo's first day at Café Reconcile. A muscular sixteen-year-old sporting baggy jeans, T-shirt, and a nasty scowl, he walked into the dining room, eyes doggedly on the floor. His rehab counselor escorted him to a seat in the back of the restaurant, and I promptly introduced myself, welcoming the young man to our program.

Pablo's head drooped slightly in a disinterested nod. He said nothing. And so went the rest of the hour-long introduction to Café Reconcile. As Pablo stood to leave, I frankly didn't expect him to last through the first week.

I'd been assigned to spend a few months working in New Orleans at Café Reconcile as part of my training as a Jesuit novice. The two years Jesuits spend in the novitiate are a period of "formation"in which novices live in community, study Ignatius's writings, do the Spiritual Exercises, and engage in work ("experiments," we call them) that integrate Jesuit spirituality into daily life. Think of it as a spiritual boot camp. So, I've been sent to a restaurant to find out what it's like to be a Jesuit engaged in ministry.

You'll find Jessica Johnson, Luther Rumley, Richard Hebert, and Donell Schaffer among the 14 professional staff and 10 student trainees at Café Reconcile in New Orleans, open for breakfasts and lunches Monday through Friday.

But a restaurant? Odd place for a Jesuit-in-training. Then again, Café Reconcile is hardly an ordinary restaurant. Where else can you find great food, job training, social outreach, literacy education, economic development, and support for marginalized youth all under one roof? Reconcile gave me crash courses in each of these parts of its operation, but the most gratifying aspect of the experiment was the time I spent in the job-training program with some remarkable young people. Take Pablo, for instance. He proved me wrong. Within a month he no longer carried around that load of attitude as he strolled through the dining room with a sparkle in his eye, chatting confidently with customers. He discovered that he's a natural in the restaurant business and even started talking of making a career of it.

"I really didn't want to be here at first,"he tells me these days. I ask why he stuck it out. "Well, everyone just kept encouraging me, and I finally decided I could do something. It's been my second chance on life here."

It's now 9:00 this Monday morning, and Café Reconcile bustles with activity. The sun streams in through large windows at the front and onto neatly arranged tables. Bacon sizzles on the grill; the tempting smell of biscuits baking drifts across the dining room. Pablo maneuvers purposefully through the restaurant, refilling coffees and taking orders. Today begins his fifth week in the St. John Francis Regis Hospitality School, a training program at the cafe for youth like Pablo. This week he's learning the art of waiting tables. Six months ago, this seventh-grade dropout had landed in a juvenile detention center for assault and drug charges. This restaurant now offers him a chance at redemption.

Burt Hartford personally removes all calories from house desserts, including a brownie with whipped cream and strawberries, short cake with berries and cream, and bananas foster bread pudding with rum sauce. A training program at the cafe gives at-risk youth the skills they need to step into New Orleans's huge hospitality industry.

Founded about four years ago, Reconcile was the brainchild of Fr. Harry Tompson, SJ. Fighting cancer, he devoted the last few years of his life to the service of the poor youth of his city. He enlisted the resources of the New Orleans Jesuit Province, Immaculate Conception Church, where he was pastor, the archdiocese, and the help of a layman named Craig Cuccia in this idea.

With the financial backing of an attorney, the two acquired a worn-down, five-story building in Central City, one of New Orleans's most dilapidated neighborhoods.

"When we moved here, our street corner was the hot spot for drugs dealers and prostitutes,"says Cuccia. "Abandoned buildings surrounded us, and several were literally crumbing into the street. We moved into one of the worst streets in one of New Orleans's poorest neighborhoods."

Central City, a popular shopping district for an African-American clientele way back, had turned into a wasteland of crime, poverty, and hopelessness. Over 70 percent of children there lived below the poverty line; just about 90 percent were born into one-parent families. The state rated the area's public schools the worst in Louisiana. Drugs haunted many street corners.

Tompson and Cuccia opened the cafe to help bring economic activity back into the neighborhood. Then they created the Regis Hospitality School to give down-and-out teenagers and young adults a new chance on life.

In a short time Café Reconcile became a fixture of hope in the neighborhood, and the Regis program has trained hundreds of young people to work in New Orleans's hospitality industry.

The cafe's executive director, Craig Cuccia, once a caterer and contractor, now works the lunch crowd. He was drawn into Jesuit Fr. Harry Tompson's dream for a place that could make a difference. Though Fr. Tompson didn't live to see it, the cafe is an economic blessing for a New Orleans neighborhood that needed all the help it could get.

Students receive an intensive introduction to the restaurant business as they rotate through every job, from dishwasher and cook to waiter and maitre d'. But the Regis School is not just vocational training. Pablo and his classmates meet daily with staff to talk about life issues and struggles at home and to receive GED tutoring. They also learn social skills and appropriate ways to express feelings. Most important, they learn that they possess God-given dignity.

It's now 9:30, and Pablo and seven of his classmates and I gather at a table as we do once or twice a week for prayer, spiritual conversation, and Bible study. Of the eight, six are under 19, half are single mothers or fathers, none has any education beyond the eighth grade, none was raised in a two-parent family.

These young people do without even simple things I take for granted, like the bicycle that gets me here in a half hour. None has a bike, much less a parent available to bring them to the cafe, so that leaves public transportation. Jessica, 18, explains that she left home at 6:30 this morning and spent nearly two and a half hours riding buses to make it here.

And transportation is often the least of their worries. Absent today is Pablo's lanky 17-year-old classmate Desean, at court for a parole hearing. Desean requested our prayers as he left yesterday, so he's on everyone's mind as I call for prayer intentions. "Thank you, Lord, for all the good gifts you've been giving me,"Jessica offers. She pauses, collects herself, then starts again, quieter but with no less confidence. "And thank you for Desean. Please, please be with him today."Others nod their heads. Despite the obstacles each has faced, they have love for one another and overwhelming trust in the Lord's providence.

The next morning Desean comes into the restaurant with a huge smile.

"Did y'all pray for me? Cuz it worked!"he says as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a picture of his two-year-old boy to show me. "Here's what it's all about."Desean's parole had been reduced, and he will now be able to spend more time with his son.

Café Reconcile is an exemplary model of Jesuit and lay collaboration. Founded by Tompson, an unmistakably Ignatian vision permeates the place. Yet day-to-day operations are managed by a lay person. Craig Cuccia, executive director, is a man of inexhaustible energy and infectious charisma. He describes himself as a "born-again" Catholic who met Tompson twelve years ago. Despite Cuccia's success as a hotel catering manager and then as a general contractor, he struggled to find fulfillment. Prayer and discernment eventually led him to work with the poor and then to Tompson.

"I was really just touched by the Lord to get involved with this. I'd spent a lot of time in the pews praying, and finally I felt the call to do something,"says Cuccia, who makes an annual Ignatian retreat.

The cafe attracts a steady stream of nearby residents as well as those who work in the Central Business District, which starts about three blocks away. The breakfast menu offers omelets and pain perdu, french toast; for lunch your choices include meat loaf, crawfish pasta, and sausage gumbo.

His vision for Café Reconcile extends far beyond its tables and dishes and even job training. He's started an after-school literacy training program at the cafe for children and adults in the neighborhood; he has given employment and support to down-and-out neighborhood residents to help them back on their feet.

He has also been a major force behind an economic revival going on in Central City. This Monday morning, as the clock approaches 10, an eclectic group of about two dozen congregates around a few tables in the dining room: women in suits, police officers, one woman wrapped in a traditional African garment, a few dressed in T-shirts and jeans. They are black and white, the youngest maybe 25, the oldest maybe 60. Most own small businesses or are working toward that. They are the Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard Merchants' Association, and they get together every Monday at the cafe to discuss issues including crime, small business loans, and the city's economic development policies.

"We don't just want to train people to work for others,"says Cuccia, who helped organize the association and mentors several of its members. "We want to empower them. We want to promote economic development not by outsiders but by people from the neighborhood."

Cuccia plans to create space in Reconcile's building for a small-business incubation center that would provide support to entrepreneurs, creating even more economic opportunity in the neighborhood. "The goal,"says Cuccia, "isn't to have kids like Pablo busing tables for the rest of their lives. We want them to be managers, maybe even owners of restaurants."

Author Jeremy Zipple, SJ, from Stillwater, Oklahoma, graduated from Boston College. He is in his second year at the Jesuit novitiate in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.

I won't be surprised if Pablo does have his own place one day. It's now nearly noon, and he looks as if he's been working in a restaurant all his life. In high gear he serves food to a crowd of patrons that includes CEOs and lawyers from the nearby Central Business District, politicians, blue-collar workers, and folks from the neighborhood, sitting side by side. They come because the food is good. They also come because they've heard about the mission and want to support it.

The cafe's 70 seats are occupied, and a good-sized crowd camps out at the door, waiting for tables. In New Orleans, women traditionally did laundry on Mondays, so they would simmer a pot of red beans over the stove all day and serve them with rice for supper. The cafe continues this tradition with a delectable red beans and rice special, the most popular entrée on Mondays.

Back in the kitchen I see Pablo loading bowls of beans onto a tray. The guy's constantly on his feet these days. He looks up, catches my glance, and smiles.

"Pablo, what do you think about the name, Café Reconcile?"I ask.

"Like people getting a second chance and starting over, right?"

"That's pretty much it," I respond.

"Then yeah, that's exactly what this place is. A new beginning. And I'm just really grateful for it."

So am I.